High-profile organizations like the United Nations have endorsed ecotourism as a way to make both environmental and economic progress in the world. Yet there is a missed opportunity in ecotourism for influencing the long-term sustainable behavior of consumers. By impacting the behavior of consumers, communicators in the ecotourism industry can make an immediate impact on issues such as resource depletion, carbon emissions, deforestation, waste management, and a wide variety of other pressing environmental concerns.

We now reside in an ever-connected global society, and we’re being confronted with difficult choices about how to move forward with the systems, societies, and cultures we’ve created. If Robert Kennedy was right when stating that “the purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better,” we can maintain hope in bleak times by looking to those who are doing the world's good work.